In a Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) communication system, a user equipment (UE) is limited to having assigned a maximum of eight bearers at any given time. If the UE's bearer limit is reached, then subsequent bearer requests associated with the UE will be rejected, regardless of the priority of the request or the level of congestion of a network.
Further, if an appropriate bearer cannot be set up for user traffic, then the user traffic will be sent over a default bearer. if a UE is associated with multiple Access Point Names (APNs), then a default bearer will be need to be set up for each APN, which reduces the number of non-default bearers available to the UE. For example, if a UE is associated with three APNs, then a default bearer will be set up for each of the three APNs and the UE will only have five remaining bearers available to it.
Additionally, a bearer typically is identified with a Quality of Service (QoS) Class Identifier (QCI) and an Allocation and Retention Priority (ARP), such that if two service data flows (SDFs) are associated with a same QCI but different ARPs, the SDFs will be mapped to two different bearers. For example, if a UE has three default bearers set up for each of the three APNs and the remaining five bearers are all allocated to SDFs, then a new bearer cannot be established for a newly requested SDF and the traffic associated with the failed SDF will have to be sent using a default bearer. This can further cause a problem when a system employs ‘make before break’ Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) bearer adjustments, wherein a new bearer has to be established before the other bearer may be torn down.
Such problems are further evident in public safety communications systems, which typically utilize a larger range of SDF priorities, for example, due to the multiple different roles of public safety officers and the larger number of QCIs employed, than in commercial systems.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions and/or relative positioning of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. It will further be appreciated that certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. Those skilled in the art will further recognize that references to specific implementation embodiments such as “circuitry” may equally be accomplished via replacement with software instruction executions either on general purpose computing apparatus (e.g., CPU) or specialized processing apparatus (e.g., DSP). It will also be understood that the terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.